Is Boarding School a Good Thing?

On October 29, weeks after our story on the St. Paul's rape case went to press, a judge in New Hampshire sentenced Owen Labrie to a yearlong prison term for the sexual assault of a fellow student. During the summer trial, he had also been convicted of a felony, for having used a computer to lure a minor; Labrie was 18 at the time of their encounter, in the spring of 2014, and the girl was 15. While the judge suspended Labrie's one-year sentence on that count, he will still have to register as a sex offender.

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Labrie's trial tore the St. Paul's community, many of whom, while horrified by the crude and conquesting nature revealed in his private conversations and emails, felt it was impossible to know whether Labrie and the girl's carrying-on had been consensual, or whether he was telling the truth when he said they'd stopped short of sexual intercourse. The jury's verdict, exonerating him on the state's primary rape charges, appeared to reflect a similar confusion or ambivalence. But during a three-hour sentencing hearing, Judge Larry M. Smukler made clear he had no doubts about what had happened; it was merely that the jury didn't find the girl had managed to communicate her lack of consent.

"She was in over her head," Judge Smukler said. He added, to Labrie, 'I have to recognize what you did to her when you committed the crime." While Labrie did not express remorse in course, and in fact didn't speak at the sentencing, the judge said he wouldn't buy his apology anyway. "Bluntly, if you did express remorse, I think it would have been dishonest," he said, according to news accounts. "In some ways, you're a very good liar."

The girl, whose identity has been withheld from the public over the course of the legal proceedings, also delivered a recorded statement by video screen that described the impact the assault has had on her. "Any time I am touched unexpectedly, my entire body jolts," she said, recounting ongoing panic attacks, suicidal feelings, and a difficulty showing affection to her family. The girl's father, speaking in the courtroom, also described her trauma in heartbreaking terms: "Every single day, every single second, I feel a profound sense of loss. The defendant has stolen so much from my daughter and from my family."

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Boarding school is a distinctly perverse and alienating experience. I can say that with authority, because I spent four years at one, and on good days I still manage to convince myself I emerged the better for it. The hard part isn't being away from home, it's confinement among one's peers in one of the most high-pressure settings one is ever likely to experience. "Other boys and girls go home at the end of the day or disappear into the streets," Nelson W. Aldrich Jr. wrote in Old Money, his landmark study of the American upper class. "But in boarding school there's no privacy, no money, and no help, except from the larger family of the school itself. There's no dreamy solitude, no slack time, no lazing around. One's entire life is spent in public, performing."

Aldrich attended St. Paul's, a 160-year-old boarding school famous for educating the elite that was recently in the news because of the rape trial of a graduating senior, Owen Labrie, for whom the performance part of boarding school seems to have been put to too much nonconstructive use.

In the spring of 2014, Labrie typed up a list for his friends of all the girls he wanted to sleep with before graduation. According to prosecutors it amounted to a more promiscuous version of the "senior salute," a term used by some students at St. Paul's to characterize all manner of romantic encounters between 12th-graders—male or female—and underclassmen. During the last week of school Labrie brought a 15-year-old girl into a mechanical room to which he and other students shared a secret key. That was where, the girl later told the police, he raped her, forcing himself on her despite her request that he stop. Labrie said that they didn't have sex and that what they did engage in was consensual. Last summer, a year after the evening in question, he stood trial in Merrimack County Superior Court, in Concord, New Hampshire.

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Concord is also the home of St. Paul's, although the campus is affectionately known as Millville, after the original name of the part of town in which it's located. Like many institutions that comprised the bedrock of an earlier American establishment (alumni include Astors, Vanderbilts, Tafts, and Kennedys), St. Paul's has continued to thrive via some combination of strategic adaptation and gracefully sticking to its guns. Most classroom discussions employ the Harkness Method, where teacher and students sit around a table. Each new student is assigned to one of three clubs upon arrival—Isthmian, Delphian, and Old Hundred—and a tally is kept to see which produces the most prizewinners in academics, intramurals, and extracurriculars. (Some of the nomenclature genuflects good-naturedly toward modernity, such as the boys' a cappella group the Testostertones.) As Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia (and a St. Paul's alum), argues in his 2011 book, Privilege: The Making of an Adolescent Elite at St. Paul's School, the school has managed to adjust to society's more open and individualistic—and self-centered—landscape in order to continue to wield influence.

Jim Cole/AP Photo

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Labrie's tone in persuading his eventual accuser to go out with him was winsome. "I want to invite you to come with me, to climb these hidden steps," he wrote in an e-mail, and after some persistence she consented. But with his friends he could be crude, joking about potential conquests as his "slaying" victims. He and a few others had a Facebook group called Slayers Anonymous. When he walked past a panel on which the alumni class rolls were carved, he made a point of rubbing the name of one Robert Barrie Slaymaker, a 1947 graduate, for good luck. "Welcome to an eight-week exercise in debauchery, a probing exploration of the innermost meanings of the word sleazebag," he wrote to his friends at the outset of spring term. He added, "Can sisters be slain in the same evening?"

His mating behavior at its most thuggish would hardly have been condoned by anyone in a position to speak for either the old St. Paul's or the current version. But on paper Labrie was an exemplar of the place, a throwback to the old boarding school ethic of sound mind and sound body. He was dynamite academically—highest honors in all coursework at a school where straight A's are unusual—and captain of the soccer team, bound for Harvard, where he planned to major in religion. (He is also said to have gotten into Yale, Princeton, and Stanford.) He won St. Paul's award for exhibiting the highest character and devotion to the school (it was later rescinded) and was considering becoming a minister.

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Yet he wasn't gliding through life without evidence of a struggle. The only child of two teachers in Vermont who divorced when he was five—one of whom, according to court records, was often out of work—he was the object of contention in a bitter custody dispute. He attended St. Paul's on full scholarship.

By many accounts Labrie was a lothario long before he made his pledge. Classmates say he suddenly changed during his fourth-form (sophomore) year, when a girl he had been dating dumped him. That would be one way to make sense of the aggressive behavior on display in the rape case, regardless of how far he actually took things that evening. When he returned to his dorm after the encounter in the mechanical room, his friends asked if he and the girl, a ninth-grader, had had sex. He answered, "No," but nodded mischievously, as if they had. When one boy asked Labrie in an e-mail, "How'd it go from no to bone?" he wrote back, "Used every trick in the book." The next day he wrote to her, "J'adore." And she replied "good," and then "haha." She went to the school infirmary for a morning-after pill, and, when asked, told the nurse she'd had consensual sex. But a few days later she reported to the police that she had been sexually assaulted, attributing her initial hesitation to a fear of ruining her older sister's graduation ceremony. (The sister was a friend and classmate of Labrie's.)

Labrie's attorney, J.W. Carney, answers questions from the press.

Cheryl Senter/Pool/AP Photo

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Most of what we have learned about their encounter, including the central matters in dispute, emerged during his trial, which means that all we really know are details that prosecutors and defense lawyers used to try to gain an advantage in court. Criminal prosecutions are a zero-sum game, and neither side has any use for the very real possibility of ambiguity. It's much simpler and more effective to marshal evidence and tell the men and women of the jury that only one interpretation makes sense. Government attorneys described Labrie as a predator, while Labrie's lawyer pointed out that the girl had shaved her pubic hair before the date and that in the e-mails afterward each had called the other an "angel," as if either fact were enough to mean she couldn't have been raped.

In the end the jury's verdict seemed split: Labrie was exonerated of felony sexual assault charges, but he was found guilty of misdemeanors having to do with the girl's age (in New Hampshire a 15-year-old isn't old enough to give consent) and a felony count for using a computer to entice a minor. While he's appealing the convictions, for which he could face 10 years in prison (the sentencing is on October 29, as this magazine goes to press), Labrie can only hope to regain his spot at Harvard, where he has not yet matriculated. Meanwhile, the girl's claims of trauma were at best only partially acknowledged. And St. Paul's, whose name will be associated with the case for a long time, still might face a lawsuit from the girl's family.

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Perhaps because of the awfulness of the case, or the difficulty of reconciling the opposing scenarios, there was a strong wish in various quarters to look for another villain or assign culpability to the irresistibly unusual setting. Lawyers for both sides, and the press, seized on St. Paul's itself and called the senior salute a ritualized form of conquest, born of a culture of privilege and entitlement. "St. Paul's School failed the children with their attitude toward the senior salute," Labrie's lawyer said in court.

Boarding schools still make the rest of the country uneasy, in part because they feel foreign and anachronistic, even as the notion of a powerful old money class in America fades. That a handful of academically high-powered schools, operating outside public view and largely apart from the influence of parents, might serve as arbiters of success runs counter to our concepts of meritocracy, as well as our definition of when childhood ends and adulthood begins.

Boarding school isn't college, and yet it isn't really high school as the rest of the country knows it. The thing that distinguishes boarding schools, even more than cost or academic rigor, is that they require students to live away from their parents and in such unrelenting proximity to one another and, of course, their teachers. Yet a case like this gives the lie to the myth of in loco parentis.

It's fair to expect the faculty to know a great deal about what goes on in the lives of the students and protect them from their worst instincts (to say nothing of running afoul of the law). When I went to boarding school, teachers seemed to hear and see so much that even their intrusive badinage—the sort of talk that would constitute a hanging offense nowadays—was considered unavoidable. I recall a corridor master one year addressing one boy on our hall as "Stinger," "because he has inflicted his penis on many a young lady." And no sooner had word begun to circulate that another boy—not as sure of himself but no less popular—was dating a girl with a fast reputation did the teacher warn him, in front of a full table in the dining hall, "She'll eat you alive."

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St. Paul's was, of course, at pains to make it known that it took the girl's allegations against Labrie seriously. But the school was put on the defensive, having been entrusted with so much responsibility and therefore having so much at stake. Earlier this year, when the administration read the e-mails among Labrie and the boys with whom he had hatched his slaying competition, it notified one of them—by now in college—to let him know that he would not be welcome on the St. Paul's campus as an alum. And additions to the student handbook make note of New Hampshire's statutory rape laws, which treat "voluntary and welcome sexual relations" involving a child younger than 16 as criminal activity.

In the world of boarding schools at large the case provoked fear and anxiety, yet any institution would be well served to study the recent action of Middlesex, one of St. Paul's peers. In August, with the fall term about to begin, Middlesex's head of school sent a letter to parents discussing Labrie's rape trial and noting that in the difficult balancing act required of a boarding school faculty—between permitting teenagers the freedom to grow and keeping a watchful eye on them—well-meaning intrusion ought to win out every time.

"It's not that we don't trust our students, and it's not that we want them to feel babysat, but it's that we know enough about adolescence to know that it takes both education and structure to make any school, including ours, a safe and comfortable place for everyone," she wrote. Much like privilege, in other words, adulthood is something best exercised when earned rather than inherited.

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